Introduction

Summary

This introduction provides an overview of the theories and methodologies necessary to reveal the social, economic, and political lives of Afro-descended Mexicans after the abolition of slavery and caste. Beginning with the cofradía del Rosario in what is now Morelia, it sets the stage for the collection by showing how references to Afro-descended communities continued after independence in 1821. The introduction argues that the limited sources about Afro-descended Mexican citizens do not preclude the study of these communities after emancipation. Instead, it requires careful, often against the grain, readings of racial identities as well as of individual and collective agency, historical themes related to slavery and freedom that are better known in the colonial period. Ultimately, the introduction attempts to provide a roadmap for future studies into the history of Afro-Mexicans in the nineteenth century.

In the early autumn of 1766, a multiracial group of 150 urban craftsmen gathered before a notary in Valladolid (now Morelia), the seat of the enormous diocese of Michoacán.¹ These working-class men asserted their views about a powerful royal official, the provincial alcalde mayor Don Luis Vélez de la Cueva Cabeza de Vaca, in the form of a 600-word petition to the new viceroy Carlos Francisco (Marquis de) Croix. The letter praised Vélez de la Cueva’s style of governance in order to argue for his continuation in office. The petitioners presented themselves as “residents of this city … [writing] in the name of all of her plebs and [those] in her province.”² Although they did not list their race labels anywhere in this document, eighteenth-century local parish and diocesan records confirm that most of the men were of African descent and came from a similar humble background to José María Morelos, the future insurgent, born a few city blocks away only eleven months before.³ What these “plebs” commended about the alcalde mayor related to their own social position: He carefully attended to the public good; he helped the poor, orphans, widows, and Indigenous people; he “made room for equity” in the justice system and in business practices; he forgave fees “at the slightest sign of indigence”; his judicial decisions were so “benign and disinterested” that “even those with whom he has been forced to use the rigor of justice are attached to him.”⁴

The petition did not succeed in keeping Vélez de la Cueva in office for the longer term. Sometime before 1771, Felipe Ordóñez y Sarmiento was appointed as Valladolid’s alcalde mayor. By 1773, Vélez de las Cuevas had received what could be interpreted as a demotion – an appointment as the alcalde mayor of the smaller provincial town of Maravatío.⁵ Even if it was unsuccessful, this document shows that Afro-descendants learned how to work within the Spanish system for their social and economic advantage. At the same time, contextualizing this petition underscores the complexities of late viceregal racial identities and how they intersected with communal and self-advocacy.

A careful study of Valladolid’s extensive archives indicates that many of the petitioners could claim descent from men and women enslaved in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.⁶ Before these free craftsmen could argue for their political cause, their ancestors worked for generations to find a slow path to economic and personal stability. Two centuries before the petition was composed, the small Valladolid population comprised forty Spanish men and fifty enslaved men and women, suggesting a few hundred total residents including uncounted Indigenous people and Spanish women and children. As well as areas with urban domestic slavery, some of the warmer agricultural regions in Michoacán grew and refined sugar on haciendas and trapiches dating back to the mid sixteenth century. In this case, the sugar was for regional use, not export, and did not create a regional economy dependent on enslaved labor. However, the sugar-based economy did foster the growth of racially diverse groups of workers and some settlements of majority African descent.⁷ Moving to a larger city for more specialized urban craftsmen jobs might have appealed to those working on haciendas or in the small towns of the region. This was the case for the paternal ancestors of Diego Durán, one of only two men able to sign his name on the 1766 petition and an important leader in a prominent Catholic organization known as the cofradía del Rosario.

Cofradías functioned as an essential support system for the poor in Spanish America, providing health care, communal fiestas, and most importantly, the benefits of burial and a funeral mass for any member. Cofradías founded and led by Africans and their descendants existed in almost all cities in New Spain. Valladolid’s Afro-descended residents desperately needed help from their community in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries as they tried to survive enslavement. Only a few indications of their early experiences remain. For example, in the first century of surviving baptism records, 914 Afro-descended infants were recorded in the city’s libros de bautismos. Their mothers, most likely enslaved domestic servants, were labeled negra or mulata by the officiating priest. The majority of these women came to the baptismal font claiming “unknown fathers” for their babies, a screen to protect Spanish men and very likely an indication of sexual violence. These infants inherited their mothers enslaved status, although it is possible that later their Spanish fathers facilitated their manumission. For this reason and owing to other manumission processes for adult men and women, over the course of the seventeenth century, the free population grew. Through astute planning, against the odds generations of Valladolid’s Afro-descendant population created a local power base situated in two cofradías. Early on, women leaders, perhaps drawn from the mothers just mentioned, helped sustain these organizations.⁸ The names listed at the start of the 1766 petition included members of several families with multigenerational ties to local Afro-descendant cofradías.

This petition provides an excellent example of how Afro-descendant residents maintained the traditional self-advocacy and community-sustaining bonds created under the Spanish viceroys. It also points to the complexity of racial terms used to label confraternities and their individual members. In Valladolid, this custom persisted well into the nineteenth century.⁹ One institution that exemplifies this continuity is the cofradía del Rosario, the brotherhood comprising several of the 1766 petitioners, among its hundreds of other plebeian members including men and women labeled mestizos and indios. About a century after its foundation, in 1681 the Rosario brotherhood formally divided in half. A Spanish branch worshipped a more centrally located image of the Virgin of the Rosary. In a side chapel, a second branch had a humbler statue and membership of “mulatos, mestizos, e indios,” usually known as “Rosario de los mulatos.” This 1681 formal division actually just served to officially shift the poorer members to a less prestigious part of the church, because a (most likely African) man named Juan Biafara had already helped lead a division away from the Spanish Rosario in 1633. While the Spaniards owned extensive properties throughout the diocese, earning them an income of at least several hundred pesos annually in the seventeenth century, the plebeian Rosario depended on street begging for alms to support their funeral masses and other membership needs.¹⁰

As the Rosario de los mulatos became more prosperous, the use of terms such as “mulato” and “pardo” also changed. Paging through notarial documents, a researcher will notice documentation mentioning the ongoing buying and selling of enslaved individuals labeled mulato from 1703 through to the 1780s.¹¹ The only mention of an enslaved person with the label pardo in the same years occurs in the 1780 sale of “María Manuela mulata de color pardo, aged 14, for 190 pesos.”¹² A 1703 last will and testament describes a significant donation of a house which could generate 157 pesos of rent a year to the cofradía de Nuestra Señora del Rosario de los mulatos by Felipe Bribescas, labeled a “mulato libre vecino de Valladolid.”¹³ By 1735, the notaries refer to the same organization as the “cofradía del Rosario de los pardos.”¹⁴ When providing a full title, notaries wrote the “cofradía de Nuestra Señora del Rosario con el título de los pardos que se venera en su capilla en la iglesia de San Francisco [confraternity of Our Lady of the Rosary with the title of the pardos that is venerated in her chapel in the San Francisco church].”¹⁵

The wealthy and powerful Rosary leader and 1766 petitioner Diego Durán seems to have personally wrestled with these labels.¹⁶ Durán’s family history exemplifies New Spain’s exogamous and often racially fluid plebian society. His maternal ancestors lived in Valladolid’s Indigenous San José barrio, and his mother received the label india. Marrying a man labeled mulato from the town of Pénjamo, María Nicolasa Durán appeared to the priest as a mulata when she stood with her husband and infant son Diego at the baptismal font in 1721. Diego Durán learned his profession at his grandfather and uncle’s knees, both well-connected, reputable builders. He had four successive wives and an extremely lucrative career building, assessing, buying, and selling urban properties, as well as lending money and serving as a trustee for prominent testators. His house was valued at 4,000 pesos, at a time when an average worker only earned 10 or 15 pesos per month. He left the Rosario cofradía in possession of 1,000 pesos when he died in 1795, after leading the organization for two decades.¹⁷ In almost all existing notarial documents, and despite his leadership of a cofradía known as de los mulatos, Durán was described only as a maestro de arquitectura or maestro de alarife (master architect or master builder). We can speculate that Durán’s local prestige empowered him to assert his identity only as a successful professional and that he intended the absence of a race label to suggest a level of prominence typical only for men labeled españoles. However, in a 1760 index of a notarial logbook, the scribe reverts to calling him a mulato even when the document itself lists no racial designation.¹⁸

Although Durán fostered factionalism in the Rosario cofradía, he left it rich and prestigious, able to purchase a solid crown decorated with almost 400 pesos worth of jewels to adorn their Virgen’s head. Descendants of the viceregal leaders continued to serve as officers in the nineteenth century, long after the cofradía discarded its own race label. Into the 1850s, Rosario still provided masses for its deceased members, a highly valued benefit especially in the decades of Insurgency.¹⁹

Despite its initial poverty, Rosario de los mulatos endured for almost three centuries. Its early national era history suggests that local people remembered the cofradía’s humble origins and may have even pondered its changing race labels over time. According to a Franciscan friar writing in 1833:

This [branch] is currently functioning and satisfactorily meeting all its obligations while the [Spanish branch] is long gone and permanently abolished, along with this odious [race label] distinction, because there was another confraternity for the faithful to completely satisfy their piety…. All that belongs to the [Spanish branch] should legally revert to the current confraternity [previously] designated de los pardos.²⁰

This brief foray into the histories of faith and social connections in Valladolid/Morelia previews how the chapters in this volume document and humanize the lives and choices of enslaved and freed peoples of African descent. Here we see a link between colonial-era survival strategies and how they extended into the national era. The 1833 comment hints at how the heirs of the Rosary brotherhood, previously designated de los pardos, were affected by and adapting to the abolition of caste in the early nineteenth century. And, returning to the beginning of this Introduction, late eighteenth-century Valladolid’s Jesuit Colegio de San Nicolás Obispo provided a fundamental education for Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla and José María Morelos in precisely the same years that Diego Durán worked hard to consolidate his personal prestige and wealth as well as the stature of his Rosario brothers and other local tradesmen. It is not entirely impossible that the 1766 petition and the vibrant local confraternity culture contributed to Hidalgo’s and Morelos’s insurgent trajectories.

Questions of Identities and Sources

The Franciscan friar’s 1833 words identifying the confraternity in Valladolid/Morelia as having previously been “designated de los pardos” points to the nettlesome terrain of understanding Afro-Mexican history in the nineteenth century. Viceregal identities, like pardo, were now at odds with the racial scripts that characterized the postindependence Mexican nation. After all, Hidalgo and Morelos had already attempted to create a social order free of caste markers and the socioeconomic systems, especially tribute and slavery, that were associated with them. “That slavery is proscribed forever, as well as the distinctions of caste,” Morelos expressed at a Constitutional Congress in Chilpancingo in 1813, “so that all shall be equal; and that the only distinction between one American and another shall be that between vice and virtue.”²¹ In 1822, one year after independence, Agustín Iturbide abolished the caste system to gain the support of Afro-descended insurgents. Then on September 16, 1829, President Vicente Guerrero, the general who had negotiated the guarantee of Afro-descended citizenship with Iturbide, unilaterally abolished slavery with the emergency powers he had to fight against a Spanish invasion.

That citizenship rights would not be defined or limited by race became a hallmark of modern Mexican statecraft just as it became a liberal ideal across the Atlantic world.²² Of course, the words spoken by Hidalgo and Morelos and the policies enshrined into law by Iturbide and Guerrero failed to produce a society free of racism. In Guerrero’s case, the abolition of slavery failed to make its way into Texas, where Anglo settlers continued to enslave Afro-descended peoples on Mexican soil until they declared themselves the independent Republic of Texas in 1836.²³ Independence-era claims of racial harmony have nonetheless beguiled historians of Afro-Mexico, almost all of whom have assumed that these patriotic calls to national unity left history’s archives bereft of relevant documents.

As Afro-Mexican Lives in the Long Nineteenth Century shows, a hodgepodge of sources referencing Afro-descended individuals and communities continued to flow from the pens of government officials, foreigners, economic elites, scholars, and Church officials, just as the friar’s comments illustrate. Sometimes tainted by political grievances and almost always informed by racial stereotypes, these sources leave as many questions as they answer. For example, we might ask: How did the members of the confraternity previously “designated de los pardos” identify themselves in 1833? How did the Mexican state classify them? How did their descendants self-identify in a nation without a national census until 1895 and where Afro-descended peoples were not counted until an intercensal survey in 2015?²⁴

As editors we ask these questions about Mexico’s Afro-descended citizens and their identities from two distinct perspectives: as a colonialist whose first book explored Afro-descended confraternities and as a scholar of Mexico in the twentieth century. Together our respective research paths have peered forward and glanced back to the nineteenth century. We find silence on this topic during the approximately 150 years between the war for independence and the mid-twentieth century, when researchers started to shape the field that has become Afro-Mexican studies. This omission has loomed large, obfuscating the lived experiences of Mexico’s Afro-descended citizens and putting a straitjacket on the political, cultural, and intellectual projects to bring contemporary Afro-descended communities into view today. Notably, by the end of the nineteenth century, national elites considered the presence of Afro-descended peoples a failure of the state to eradicate all undesirable colonial vestiges, chiefly those left by the caste system.²⁵ As Ben Vinson III and Matthew Restall have explained, “Blacks were literally written out of the national narrative.”²⁶

To explore the history of Afro-descended Mexicans in the nineteenth century requires exploring the lives of individuals who had at some point been classified as having African ancestry. This history similarly requires exploring how individuals who were not Afro-descended discussed the lives of those who were.²⁷ Accordingly, the contributors to this collection have had to consider not just how to mine archival repositories for clues about the lives of Afro-descended communities but also how to wrestle with the social constructions, racial representations, and historical silences about who was – or might have been – Afro-descended.²⁸

Racial Terminologies in Afro-Mexican Lives in the Long Nineteenth Century

To write (and to read) about racial identity in the United States in the twenty-first century calls for an awareness of the debates about the violence words can produce as well as the stereotypes, false assumptions, cultural implications, innuendos, and euphemisms they can reinforce or overturn. The Black Lives Matter Movement and the resurgence of White Nationalism brought the grammar of race under increased scrutiny. Editorial boards and authors discuss capitalizing Black to bestow it more explicitly with the collective dignity that African Americans have forged through and despite centuries of oppression. “Giving black a big B could signal that it’s not a generic term for some feature of humanity,” philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah wrote for The Atlantic on June 18, 2020, “but a name for a particular human-made entity.” For Appiah, the social construction of race mandates capitalizing Black.²⁹ This grammatical choice is intimately woven into contemporary Afro-diasporic politics and also, as historian Jessica Marie Johnson notes, a broader Pan-African worldview that does not always align with the senses of self and community articulated by all Afro-descended peoples, both past and present.³⁰

For scholars of Latin America writing for English-speaking audiences, the question of racial terminology is even more complex. There are long-standing concerns that US racial politics has already cast too strong a shadow over Latin America’s unique histories of racial formation.³¹ Cognizant of these concerns, historian Paulina L. Alberto recently chose to capitalize Black to allow US readers to “find the experiences of Argentines racialized as negro and negras, and the anti-Black ideologies behind them, disturbingly familiar.” The Afro-descended people she writes about ultimately deserve “the same dignity African American readers have rightfully come to expect.”³²

The act of translating race is not always as simple as replacing negro and negra with Black. After all, racial terms are typically not capitalized in Spanish, doubly leaving the questions about capitalization in the United States in the hands of researchers and editorial staffs. As literary scholar Brent Hayes Edwards argues, many of the nuances found in racial vocabularies – the cultural connotations and historical implications that make one word acceptable and another unacceptable – are often “what resists or escapes translation.”³³ Careful attention to the translation is not a new demand on the scholars who write about race in Latin America. Explanations about how an author will use racial terminologies have become a frequent note or prologue in scholarship written about Latin America in the United States and increasingly also in Mexico.³⁴

In the twenty-first century, terms describing Afro-descended identities have begun to enter the public arena in Mexico. Grassroots organizations along the Costa Chica of Guerrero and Oaxaca, such as México Negro, have slowly transformed national discussions about racism, antiracism, and racial recognition since the 1990s.³⁵ Most notably, beginning in 2011, the National Institute of Statistics and Geography’s embarked on a project to count the nation’s Afro-descended peoples for the first time since independence. Its use of the terms negro(a), afrodescendiente (Afro-descended), and afromexicano(a) (Afro-Mexican) in the 2015 national survey and the 2020 national census has shaped recent debates about Afro-descended Mexicans.³⁶

As editors, we cannot presume that these state-sanctioned terms accurately represent the broader cultural and political meanings within and around Afro-descended identities in Mexico today or in the past. Ignacio Pareja Amador, Director General de Población de Oaxaca, explained in 2019 that “the term ‘afromexicano’ should not be viewed as an exclusive category, but instead a classification under construction, informed by historical, cultural, and demographic processes that shaped what we now view as ‘African,’ but which had different connotations in the past.”³⁷ Similarly, anthropologist Bobby Vaughn observed in his own fieldwork that some activists from the organization México Negro prefer afromestizo to signify racially mixed but predominantly of African descent. Afromestizo theoretically allows for an African presence to be recognized within the nation’s larger celebration of racial and cultural mixture (mestizaje), without succumbing to terms used within the colonial caste system.³⁸ Laura A. Lewis’ ethnographic work among the residents of San Nicolás, Guerrero, echoes Vaughn’s point about the peculiarities to local claims racial and mestizaje identity. Many of the individuals she studied identified as morenos, which she defines as “a race of mixed black Indians” and which she claims rejects the US-centrism of terms such as Black, Afro-Mexican, and afromestizo.³⁹ Other terms to discuss Afro-descended peoples and communities in Mexican history and contemporary society have included afrodisiaco, afrosucesor, and the more generic “black ethnicities.”⁴⁰

In the nineteenth century, the possible range of terms pointing to who could be identified as Afro-descended was even more wide ranging and ambiguous. The language surrounding racial and cultural mixture became the point of departure for modern Mexican nationality. Those academics and policymakers who celebrated mestizaje’s egalitarianism nonetheless had to respond to – and often embraced – the century’s celebration of scientific racism, which placed Whiteness at the pinnacle of human development, and which equated Indigeneity, Blackness, and mixture with degeneracy.⁴¹ Further complicating matters, references to caste continued in some social arenas, even if they became less frequent by the end of the century. For instance, the Catholic Church continued to use these markers in matrimonial records.⁴² Social records as late as 1859 referenced Afro-descended peoples euphemistically and as individuals who lacked a clean lineage, an idea that directly referenced the purity of blood doctrines that animated viceregal social divisions.⁴³ Caste language even reared its head in the national press when regional conflicts, for instance in the states of Veracruz and Yucatán, brought fears of race war to elites concerned with regional independence movements and nationwide conflicts especially during and after the War with the United States (1846–48). With their origins in the late colonial period and especially during the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804), references to caste war exacerbated fears of Afro-descended and Indigenous peoples mobilizing against the interests of mestizo and White landowners.⁴⁴

Historical research has often tried to align prominent nineteenth and twentieth-century individuals, such as Vicente Riva Palacio (the grandson of Vicente Guerrero) and Lázaro Cárdenas, with ‘being Black.’ In this line of thinking, historians trace even the slightest hint of an Afro-descended heritage back to one or more family members with a verifiable African ancestry to determine an individual’s true racial identity. This methodology hearkens back to the United States’ one-drop rule, which itself was only established in law in the first decades of the twentieth century.⁴⁵ It also assumes the processes of classifying people in birth, baptismal, marriage, and death records were consistent and accurate. Flattening discussions of Afro-descended identities and experiences as such can overstate the presence of Mexico’s Afro-descended population at the beginning of the nineteenth century. These genealogical histories risk transforming racial mixture into an either/or binary where Blackness was or was not present, even when the evidence was unclear, contradictory, or clouded by nineteenth-century racial thought.⁴⁶

Each of the chapters in Afro-Mexican Lives in the Long Nineteenth Century addresses the making of Afro-descended racial identities from one or more points of view. Some contributors approach this history from the intellectual and cultural histories of race, colony, and nation produced by the lettered elite before, during, or after the abolition of caste and slavery. Other authors take a social approach based on the lived experiences of Afro-descended individuals and communities, their political affiliations, and their economic situations.⁴⁷ Finally, some move between the two. Taken as a whole, Afro-Mexican Lives in the Long Nineteenth Century reveals the intertwined and contingent histories of enslavement and freedom, grassroots community building, and Mexican nation-state formation. These different points of entry into the history of Afro-descended peoples, cultures, and identities in the long nineteenth century require varied archival sources including viceregal documents filled with references to caste identities, postemancipation sources that attempt to work within a colorblind society, and twentieth-century cultural expressions that respond to these multifaceted histories of Afro-descended identity formation. These sources – just like those related to the twenty-first-century social and political movements – lack a common racial and cultural vocabulary about who was and was not Black, Afro-descended, Afro-Mexican, and so on.⁴⁸

As editors, we decided that we could not dictate our contributors’ historical and political decisions about racial terminology, capitalization, and translation. To have done so would infringe on how they discuss their sources and would amend their voices, their racial politics, and their arguments. Imposing a common language would also risk homogenizing the daily experiences of Afro-descended Mexicans, limiting how we explore, contextualize, and write about the diverse forms of oppression they endured and their resistance and survival strategies before and after the abolition of slavery and caste.⁴⁹ Thus, we asked each contributor to explain these decisions briefly in short prefaces to their chapters. As a result, we also ask each reader to embrace the messy lexicographic and historical ambiguities that permeate Afro-Mexican Lives in the Long Nineteenth Century as well.

Nineteenth-Century Afro-Mexico

Nineteenth-century Mexican history has lagged behind the histories of the viceregal period and the twentieth century, and the history of nineteenth-century Afro-Mexico has lagged most of all.⁵⁰ It would be easy to attribute this to the racial hypotheses crafted after independence. For example, in 1836, liberal historian José María Luis Mora explained that the nation had a very small Afro-descended population, with the majority of it having “almost completely disappeared.” Along Pacific and Atlantic coasts, where these communities remained visible, they “will disappear completely by the middle of the century.”⁵¹ Just over a century later, and after having established himself as the founding figure what is now called Afro-Mexican studies, anthropologist Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán gave little attention to the nineteenth century, proposing that nearly all Afro-descended communities eagerly shed their racial categories to remove the stigmas of enslavement and to embrace national transition from a caste to a class society. Self-identifying Afro-descended communities, he concluded in the 1950s, only endured where the federal government had not yet destroyed the last remnants of colonial caste relations.⁵²

Most recently, the academic and popular point of departure has been that modern Mexico was – and still is – anti-Black. The silencing, erasure, or assimilation of Afro-descended citizens in the century after independence allowed elite academicians, policymakers, cultural producers (artists, musicians, etc.), and officials to project an historical narrative that celebrated a pre-Columbian past, a mestizo present, and a White future.⁵³ These histories of anti-Blackness presume a monolithic state-sponsored project to render all Afro-descended citizens invisible. They sometimes go as far as to assume that nation’s founding credos of racelessness can best be explored in relation to the histories of Afro-descended migrants from abroad, including the enslaved African Americans who fled the United States search of freedom in Mexico and elsewhere in the Americas.⁵⁴ Accordingly, national claims of racial egalitarianism, which fiercely critiqued New World slavery and then Jim Crow segregation in the United States, become the focus of scholarly investigation.⁵⁵ Left unexplored are the lived experiences of the Afro-descended individuals and communities who navigated the overlapping and sometimes incomplete transitions from colony to nation, caste to citizen, and slavery to freedom.⁵⁶

The chapters in Afro-Mexican Lives in the Long Nineteenth Century reconsider how to explore and use sources relevant to the lives and worldviews of Afro-descended Mexicans, no matter how they were classified in archives and in other primary sources, written or otherwise. Rather than bemoan the sources lost to claims of racelessness, this collection follows in Ann Laura Stoler’s footsteps by working “to distinguish between what was ‘unwritten’ because it could go without saying and ‘everyone knew it,’ what was unwritten because it could not yet be articulated, and what was unwritten because it could not be said.”⁵⁷ In these liminal spaces, references to Afro-descended citizens resided among what was known (there had been enslaved peoples in New Spain), what was not yet acknowledged (Afro-descended individuals were contributing to the nation), and what was unsayable (their presence was not disappearing in the ways that many nineteenth-century elites had prophesied).

In other words, to revisit and reveal the lives of the Afro-descended Mexicans who navigated the century after the abolition of slavery and caste requires the historical readings, intuitions, and speculations that make sense of what was often implied, at the margins of, or glossed over in a nation claiming to be free of biological race.⁵⁸ The choice to be identifiable as Afro-descended was itself a form of agency. To be racially visible in the archival record was an act of resistance to or an outright rebellion from the nation’s claim to be without racial categories. And, of course, it was also a choice to not be associated with an African past. To assimilate was a survival strategy to live within the postindependence liberal claims to be devoid of race and racism.⁵⁹

Local conditions shaped these personal decisions to identify as Afro-descended, to assimilate into the mestizo landscape, or to adopt another racial identity, just as they were before independence.⁶⁰ The nineteenth century’s frequent civil wars and foreign interventions also shaped how Afro-descended citizens understood their place in the nation and contributed to the political and economic outcomes they deemed most expedient.⁶¹ In this context, state and regional officials negotiated the boundaries of acceptable political action with local and regional communities, thereby shaping modern conceptions of mestizaje, Indigeneity, and, as Afro-Mexican Lives in the Long Nineteenth Century shows, Blackness. For government officials, the goals were political stability, fiscal solvency, and socioeconomic modernity. For Indigenous and Afro-descended communities, these negotiations were often concerned with claiming their place in the nation, often by protecting their individual and collective rights: their land, autonomy, and traditions.⁶²

Outline

Hidalgo’s call to begin insurgency and the start of the 1910 Revolution bookend the history of nineteenth-century Mexico.⁶³ Yet the history of Afro-Mexico does not neatly align with this chronology. A concept of Europeanized “Modern Mexico” can be envisioned as beginning in the mid eighteenth century, or even before. The era of Bourbon rule introduced reforms aimed to emulate Europe as well as new approaches to Spain’s economy. Although often inspired by European wars, many reforms had to do with maximizing economic output, which intersected with new late viceregal forms of racialization. For example, the eighteenth century saw significant reforms in the judicial system connected to ensuring the safety of travelers and imported goods by policing the rural highways as well as labor productivity. Bourbon reforms relating to urban beautification and concerns about violence and property crimes expressed fears of the Mexico City population, whom authorities viewed as barbaric and lazy, traits conceptualized as part of Indigenous drinking patterns. Some of the least effective Viceregal tactics in this era were violent vindictive justice and street patrols, which sought to terrify viceregal subjects to prevent rebellion.⁶⁴

Turning to the chapters, Part I of this volume begins with Joseph M. H. Clark’s study of how mobile Afro-descended individuals living in seventeenth-century New Spain interacted with, borrowed from, and contributed to the broader African diaspora. The prolific documentary record presented in Chapter 1 offers many examples of Afro-descendants living in Spain, Portugal, Cartagena de Indias, Havana, Puerto Rico, and other locations in the Caribbean. Geographic mobility also features in Chapter 2 by Norah L. A. Gharala, which investigates eighteenth-century efforts to evade royal tribute as Spanish officials doubled down on their efforts to generate lists of Afro-descended colonial subjects. While most tributaries tolerated this status, others hid or fled their homes to evade paying the tax. Gharala looks at cases of documented resistance to tribute, including refusing to pay, calling out corrupt officials, showing their loyalty to the crown in other ways such as militia service, and crafting a different heritage for themselves that made them ineligible for tribute.

Focusing on the region around Veracruz, Chapter 3 by Alan Alexander Malfavon foregrounds the rise and fall of Black Insurgent and freedman José Antonio Martínez, who led the rebels in this region starting in 1812. During José María Morelos’ peak era of success, Mexican insurgents called for the prohibition of slavery at the Conference of Chilpancingo in 1813. At this time, Martínez had a similar level of military success over eastern New Spain as Morelos had achieved over the southern and central regions. However, Criollo insurgents opposed both Afro-descended leaders. Both Morelos and Martínez were killed in 1814, the first by fellow insurgents, the second after a trial for treason by the tribunal of the Holy Office of the Spanish Inquisition.

In 1824, after the fall of Iturbide’s short-lived empire, leaders of the early Mexican Republic met to create a new constitution. Chapter 4 by Beau D. J. Gaitors examines how these constitutionalists discussed slavery at the precise moment that Anglo slave owners settled in Texas. Although the Mexican constitution abolished the transatlantic slave trade, it allowed states to determine their own laws regarding settlement and slavery. Gaitors’ chapter shows how, ultimately, Guerrero’s 1829 abolition of slavery contributed to Texas’ independence movement.

Part II turns to the period after the abolition of slavery and caste, especially after Texan independence in 1836, when abolition and citizenship rights – not slavery – operated as the point of departure for local, regional, and national discussions of Afro-descended communities.⁶⁵ As these chapters show, national claims to racial harmony and Black disappearance did not write Afro-descended communities out of Mexican history. Such allegations affected the myriad layers of historical narration, from how historical documents were produced and people were identified to how historians and other scholars have explored the lived experiences of Afro-descended individuals.⁶⁶ In Chapter 5, Jorge E. Delgadillo Núñez turns to print culture, chiefly newspapers, to show how the postcolonial condemnation of Spanish rule and the celebration of the abolition of slavery simultaneously recognized the presence of Afro-descended peoples and set the stage for them to be rendered socially invisible by the 1850s. This racial storytelling, he explains, was especially a response to Texas’ declaration of independence in 1836 and then the war that began after the United States annexed it as a slave state in 1845.

The chapters by John Radley Milstead and Jayson Maurice Porter turn to the Costa Chica of Oaxaca and Guerrero to explore how Afro-descended communities navigated the rise of liberal politics and global capitalism, especially in the second half of the nineteenth century.⁶⁷ Both chapters explore the racialization of space – geography and ecology – to exhume the forms of agency and autonomy found among Afro-descended communities along the Costa Chica of Oaxaca and Guerrero. In Chapter 6, Milstead explores the tensions between Indigenous and Afro-descended communities in Jamiltepec, Oaxaca, from the Lerdo Law (1856), which privatized ecclesiastical and Indigenous lands, to the Mexican Revolution. Mexico’s integration into the capitalist world system, he argues, gave Afro-descended communities with historical ties to cotton production a means to ally with liberal elites. As a result, they chose a more conservative approach to the revolutionary 1910s than the Indigenous communities who were not as integrated into these cotton networks. In Chapter 7, Porter examines oilseed production in and around Azoyú, Guerrero, as an archival repository to understand Afro-descended ecologies and Mexican anti-Blackness. Tracing the evolution of the plantation economies from the seventeenth century to the twentieth, he weaves together viceregal and postindependence histories to contend that the oilseeds needed for the Second Industrial Revolution limited the autonomy Afro-descended peoples enjoyed when they grew cotton. By the 1930s, Porter concludes, postrevolutionary demands for agrarian reform caught the attention of these dispossessed Afro-descended communities.

During and immediately after the 1910 Revolution, artists, politicians, and intellectuals were generally not concerned with the local interests of Afro-descended communities. In Chapter 8, Deborah Cohen takes inspiration from Alfredo Ramos Martínez’s painting Flores Mexicanas (1914–29) to consider the historical and racial possibilities of postrevolutionary mestizaje. She reveals how he ushered in a new, more popular, and ethnographically specific approach to Mexican art that celebrated the nation’s Indigenous past and mestizo present. As she argues, Ramos Martínez and others like him took prerevolutionary assumptions of Black disappearance to their logical (or illogical?) conclusion: Afro-descended peoples were not part of Mexico’s national narrative. Finally, concluding the collection, in Chapter 9, Theodore W. Cohen explores how and why in the 1940s and 1950s the field of Afro-Mexican studies began to emerge. In tracing the sometimes overlapping, sometimes diverging theoretical and methodological approaches to determine the extent of the nation’s African presence, he asks why nineteenth-century Afro-Mexican history has not been studied in greater detail. He demonstrates that debates about sources, methods, and the construction of racial identities have always shaped how the histories of Afro-descended Mexicans in the nineteenth century have been told.